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American among 116 aboard plane down in Mali

Doug Stanglin, USA TODAY
3:51 p.m. CDT July 24, 2014

An official shows on a map an area where an Air Algerie plane is supposed to went missing, on July 24, 2014 in Ouagadougou. An Air Algerie plane with more than 110 people on board including French and Spanish nationals went missing on July 24 during a flight from Burkina Faso to Algiers. A source in Mali said that contact with the McDonnell Douglas MD-83 was lost over Gao in north Mali, a region that was seized by jihadists groups for several months in 2012 and that remains very unstable despite the Islamists being driven out in a French-led offensive.(Photo: AHMED OUOBA AFP/Getty Images)

An Air Algerie flight en route to Algiers from Burkina Faso with 116 people aboard, including 50 French citizens and one American, crashed Thursday in northeastern Mali, the airline said.

The airline said on its Twitter account that the plane went down about 40 miles from the Malian city of Gao. It did not give any additional details.

In Washington, an administration official who declined to be identified by name said one U.S. citizen was believed on board the flight.

"The plane disappeared at Gao (in Mali), (300 miles) from the Algerian border. Several nationalities are among the victims," Prime Minister Abdelmalek Sellal was cited as saying by Algerian radio, the French news agency AFP reports.

Ouagadougou Airport in Burkina Faso says on its Facebook page that the passengers on the flight included two European officials of French nationality stationed in Ouagadougou.

An unidentified Algerian aviation official also told Reuters that the plane had crashed, but declined to provide details on where the plane was or what caused the accident.CBS News also quotes an unidentified Algerian officials as saying the plane had crashed.

The pilot reportedly contacted air traffic control in Niamey, Niger, to change course because of a storm, the BBC reports.

The French news agency AFP quotes an unidentified source with the airlines as saying the plane was "not far from the Algerian frontier when the crew was asked to make a detour because of poor visibility and to prevent the risk of collision with another aircraft on the Algiers-Bamako route."

The flight encountered thunderstorms with frequent lightning while flying across southern Mali, but, according to AccuWeather meteorologist Anthony Sagliani, the thunderstorms were not particularly violent.

"In general, there were scattered showers and thunderstorms across all of Burkina Faso and the southern half of Mali." Sagliani said. "This was with the monsoon trough which is typically found here in late July. So this activity was quite normal."

United Nations troops in Mali say they understand the plane came down between Gao and Tessalit, the BBC's Alex Duval Smith in the Malian capital Bamako reports.

The French military sent two fighter jets based in the region to try to locate the missing plane, according to Reuters. France 24 TV quotes an official from Niger as saying the French have sent three military reconnaissance planes to help in the search.

Swiftair, the owner of the missing plane operated by Air Algerie, Algeria's national airline, says 110 passengers and six crew were aboard. The aircraft is an MD-83, according to Reuters.

The airline confirmed on Twitter that 50 of the passengers are French citizens. French Transport Minister Frédéric Cuvillier says "likely many" French passengers were aboard the missing flight, France 24 TV reports. The six-person crew — including the two pilots — are Spanish, the Spanish newspaper El Pais reports.

Also among the passengers are 24 citizens of Burkina Faso, eight Lebanese, six Algerians, five Canadians, and four Germans, Air Algerie said.

Flight AH 5017 flies the Ouagadougou-Algiers route four times a week, AFP reported. It was supposed to land in the Algerian capital at 0510 GMT (1:10 a.m. ET Thursday), according to the Algerian newspaper The Daily Star.

Ouagadougou, the capital of the west African nation of Burkina Faso, is in a nearly straight line south of Algiers, passing over Mali where unrest continues in the north.

However, a senior French official said it was unlikely that fighters in Mali had weaponry that could shoot down a plane, the Associated Press reports. The official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because she was not authorized to speak for attribution, said the fighters have shoulder-fired weapons that could not hit an aircraft at cruising altitude.

Though crashes of commercial passenger planes have become rare, it's not unprecedented for them to occur within a short time period.

Two commercial passenger planes crashed within days of each other in December 2012. A Fokker 100 flying for Burma-based Air Bagan crash-landed in Burma, also known as Myanmar, on Dec. 25, killing one passenger and a person on the ground, according to The Aviation Herald.

On Dec. 29, a repositioning flight on a Tupelov Tu-204 flying for Russian carrier Red Wings Airlines overran a runway in Moscow. Five of the eight crewmembers were killed, according RT.com.

Passenger planes flying regularly scheduled airline flights crashed within the same week in 2011. A flight for Hewa Bora Airways, based in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, crashed in that country July 8. On July 11, a flight on Russian carrier Angara Airlines ditched in Russia's Ob River after an engine caught fire, The Aviation Heraldreported. On July 16, a flight on Brazilian carrier Noar Linhas Aereas crashed after takeoff from Recife.

A team of French soldiers found the wreckage from the Air Algerie jetliner near Mali's border with Burkina Faso and there are no survivors. The plane was lost 50 minutes after it took off. Air Algerie flies the four-hour passenger route four times a week.